November 19, 2010

Recently Infor won an Altimeter Group Open Leadership Award for our social media strategy. While accepting our award, Charlene Li asked me how I was able to get Executive buy-in for my strategy. I found this was a common question that many strategist are asking. I jokingly said that we didn't get by-in, but the reality was that our Executives were deeply involved and significant thought was put into how to engage them. So while developing Infor's social strategy, I formulated a two part approach.

Bottom Up Approach

My first approach was to create a grassroots groundswell leveraging the most social employees in the organization. This was often the younger new hires or early adopters already using social media tools. I identified that the primary barrier to increasing their involvement was an official corporate stance that allowed them to participate. Thus one of my initial action items was to create corporate guidelines that created guardrails to protected them as well as the organization.

Next I created a private Yammer community for them to participate and share their experiences. I wanted to use this internal community to drive Word of Mouth Marketing for the adoption of social tools as well as provide use cases. Users were encouraged to invite their non social employees to take part, initially just by listening to the various conversations occurring, then actively engaging. This accelerated the groundswell of awareness and eventually engagement.

Some of the reasons I think this was successful is that there was zero cost associated with it and it was an unofficial extension to official interactions occurring on our Intranet and Wiki sites. Additionally the speed of communication and sharing illustrated the power these new social tools had. Also, I had numerous case studies and an army of early adopters that I could leverage for my second approach.

Top Down Approach

To directly get buy-in by Executives and make social computing part of our corporate strategy, I again had to identify the different barriers in front of me. As with any disruptive technology, I found that Executives were in one of three places:

They didn't want anything to do with social media for business

They had preconceived (right or wrong) ideas of how social media related to business

They thought social media was fundamental to the future of business both internally and externally.

I targeted working with the last group to leverage them as advocates for my strategy. Starting with individual conversations, I presented my plan to them, highlighting risks and rewards. Eventually I was tasked with developing and executing this plan myself (i.e. assuming the risk).

Some of the reasons I think this buy-in was successful is that I found some early adopters that were key influencers within the organization. Also, I presented a low risk, high reward plan, with little upfront cost, and directly tied to our business goals/campaigns. Lastly, I enlisted these advocates to provide cover for me; for any questions that might arise from the other two Executive groups (i.e. minimizing my risk).

Next, for the other two groups, I focused primarily on the second one, who may or may not have a clear understanding of what social media was. I communicated daily via various internal channels three things:

Case studies by their influential peers on social media

Different use cases for social media in (our) business

Stats and KPI's as to my plan's effectiveness.

Some of the reasons I think this was successful was that I positioned myself as a facilitator and let other advocates and key influencers do the influencing. Most importantly my strategy was driven by existing business goals/campaigns and was measurable.

For the first group that didn't want anything to do with social media or saw no value for it in business, I didn't come across this often, so I didn't focus a lot of my efforts here. 20 years ago I had similar resistance from those who said the Internet was just a fad, primarily for kids. Eventually these people will come around, but there is nothing you can easily do to directly influence them. Most likely some form of external crisis will be the catalyst (e.g. losing market share to competitors leveraging social media, negative brand perception via word of mouth, etc.).

Next Steps

So when promoting and getting buy-in for my strategy I used different tactics for different groups. I first started with listening to what reservations they had and identifying barriers to success. Profiling them into different groups, I regularly communicated to each (enlisting other advocates & key influencers), addressing what was important to them and increasing their understanding. In reality, I used social media tactics to gain social media buy-in.

As for next steps, getting buy-in will be an on-going process as Executives come and go and this space keeps evolving. One thing that is already changing is the importance of how social computing affects the bottom line for companies and how this is measured.

Different departments have different criteria for measurement and success, but in the end, everything ties back to revenue. In my next post, I'll cover how we are measuring our social media effectiveness and some best practices that are emerging in this field.

October 05, 2010

I got a job in Social Media! Don't worry, I didn't leave my existing company, but I just have a new role.

As you know, I've been working at Infor, a business software company, for the past 13 years. Even though I 'do something with computers' and *love* fixing your PC issues, my role for for the past decade has been a bit more involved. I've focused on providing value to Infor by managing the development & marketing of it's websites (you could loosely summarize this as Internet Marketing if anyone asks). However over the last few years I have been increasingly involved in something called Social Media (though it's more correctly defined as Social Computing).

About a year ago, our CMO at Infor wanted to explore the use of Social Media to, among other things, bring our 80,000+ customers, 1,200+ partners, and 7,000+ employees closer together. Eventually, they realized that I would be the best person to head this group, develop a strategy, and execute it. So, I've been 'officially' doing this role for about 10 months now.

Now that you're on Facebook, you probably know Social Media as websites or tools that connect people into communities. Some other websites you've probably heard about are Twitter and LinkedIn, but there are hundreds more. Social Media is pretty popular right now, with many people capitalizing on misinformation by writing books, lecturing, forming events, blogging, and 'networking'. Despite what you read though, it's quite straight forward and fundamentally just involves genuine communication using a new set of tools.

As you know I thrive in areas that are overcomplicated (for no apparent reason) and that empower people. Social Media is just such an area. Some of the basic ideas were discussed in a book called 'The Cluetrain Manifesto' over a decade ago. It discussed how the Internet can take the relationship that businesses and consumers have, back to how it was before big manufacturers produced everything in bulk. Kind of how you like to meet and discuss the produce you buy with the farmers that grew them. This was how the Intranet originally was, so I'm glad it's going back that way.

So my new role is to develop strategies to help Infor build stronger relationships using these social sites and tools - both internally focused for our employees/partners and externally for our customers/prospects. You would think that smart companies are already connected with everyone involved in their business, and Infor is more than others, but these new social sites are creating new and faster ways to easily connect.

Some of the elements of the strategy I've created are:

Explain the business value of Social Media

Cultivate Executive sponsorship for my plan

Help others overcome the fear of participating in Social Media

Develop Policies and Procedures for employees

Encourage and motivate employees to participate

Educate & train employes/partners on using Social Media for their business goals

I'm well underway executing day-to-day tactics of my strategy. I've got the backing of my manager and numerous people willing to help me. So far I've got over 1/3 of our 7,000+ employees participating in some form of Social Media. Kind of exciting! Right now I'm spending most of my time with #6 above, which is why I haven't been able to call in a long time, *sorry*. But since you've friended me on Facebook, you probably know a lot of what my daily activities are anyways.

Soon I'll share more about how I'm transforming Infor into a social company and what things are working and what things aren't. Miss you and talk to you soon!

October 21, 2008

One Mustard Seed is a non profit ministry with the purpose of developing fresh new Christian resources and materials for 21st century kids, youth, and adults. We seek to produce materials and resources that will be available to the general public as well to send to impoverished countries to endorse and instill positive Christian values.

April 21, 2008

Michael offers some great insights into a radical approach to traditional news gathering. Here are some of my additional points I propose regarding the inevitability of this revolution:

1) Accessibility - In our time displaced economy (think Tivo), we
have access to news and information anywhere anytime (think iPhone).
Thus I see less reliance on traditional, fixed time, hour long
broadcasts to get this. Consequently, I also see the ‘pull’ vs ‘push’
paradigm continue to proliferate because it increases the consumers
control to WHEN they get information - realtime even.

2) Relevance (trust) - Increasingly, there is less trust and
relevance with traditional media outlets. The social revolution has
also enabled consumers to find and choose WHERE they get their
information and how personally relevant it is to them. The ‘reality’
trend alluded to this, but traditional media still clung to over
produced segments that the online generation saw right through. What is
needed is information from people (plural) who consumers can relate to,
raw, and niche targeted.

So how do I see this playing out… Imagine traveling to Europe and
with a few free days you decide to take a side trip to Paris. Since you
had little time to plan this trip, you pull out your iPhone and bring
up Google Maps. With GPS, the iPhone knows your current location and
suggests events/meetups/restaurants/sights/news going on within your
immediate area right now. Like, a new exhibition at the Musee d’Orsay
today (with directions and link to buy tickets), or transit workers on
strike, so recommendations to take a taxi. Also, right from Google Maps
are video overlays of short 2 min VJ dispatches describing these;
exactly tailored to your likes/dislikes and from your ‘trusted sources’.

Social Media is currently being
touted as the answer to life, the universe, and everything online, but
there is a lot more to it than just hitching a ride.
Lets take a look at some of the things you need to think about before
you even contemplate a social media marketing strategy.

April 16, 2008

Buck, 29, used the ubiquitous short messaging service to tap out a single word on his cellular phone: ARRESTED. The message went out to the cell phones and computers of a wide circle of friends in the United States and to the mostly leftist, anti-government bloggers in Egypt who are the subject of his graduate journalism project.

April 07, 2008

A current project (work in progress) for a wedding trailer for my friends wedding. I didn't have a lot of footage to work with, but I thought I'd put together something for them to remember the special day. I've got a bit more work to do on it (some of the edits need work), but I thought I'd share this now.